Salinger's Letters

JD Salinger’s letters reveal caustic opinions on people and his work

James Bone in New York

A newly released cache of letters by J.D. Salinger sheds fresh light on how he went from a celebrated young author who dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to a recluse raging at the “big shitty world”.

The 11 letters were written by Salinger to Michael Mitchell, the commercial artist and his former neighbour, who designed the cover of The Catcher in the Rye. The letters show that Salinger maintained a stringent writing discipline for decades after his last published story in 1965, working at his desk from 6am to noon, and had at least two “scripts”, or books, he had been “picking at for years” before his death last month.

“The reason that these letters are especially good is that they are written from a literary artist to a visual artist,” said Declan Kiely, a curator at the Morgan Library in New York, which is preparing to put them on public view for the first time next week. “So they talk about what it is to struggle as an artist — to struggle with creativity.”

The first letter was written from London on May 22, 1951, just as Salinger, then 32, was about to publish The Catcher in the Rye. He was escorted around town by his British publisher Hamish Hamilton, whom he describes as an excellent host but a “professional get-together boy”.

He went to see Olivier and his wife Leigh in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and was invited afterwards to dine at their house in Chelsea, which he described as a “very posh evening”. In another letter written in 1983, Salinger compared Olivier unfavourably as an actor with John Wayne in The Shootist.

Salinger withdrew from public life in 1953 to a 90-acre (36ha) property in New Hampshire. In one letter, dated December 30, 1983, he rails at “some English prick” who has been commissioned to write a biography of him — a reference to Ian Hamilton, the British author of In Search of J.D. Salinger, with whom he fought a long legal battle. Perhaps his most revealing comment comes on April 6, 1985, when he laments that his life was not really “tellable in any of the normal ways that friends tell each other how things are going”.

The letters end in 1993 with him curtly rebuffing a request from Mr Mitchell to autograph a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Mr Mitchell apparently sold the letters to a dealer soon afterwards and they found their way to the collector Carter Burden. His widow donated them to the Morgan Library, which kept them sealed until after the author’s death.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article7025743.ece